Daughter Tells of Terror in Gallion Murder Trial

A woman whose maternal grandmother was strangled 23 years ago took the witness stand against her father Wednesday, saying she was so terrified of him that it took her more than two decades to tell police he had confessed the slaying to her.

Even today, 43-year-old Catherine Marie Gallion continued, the emotional scars from years of abuse have left her so frightened of her father that she had tried to slit her wrists the night before the trial began.

“I’m concerned about my father coming after me,” she said during the first day of testimony in the trial of Harlan Gallion. “The only reason I’m here--I’ve been hiding from him all this time--is because [investigators] tracked me down.”

It was Catherine Gallion’s recollection of her father’s confession that enabled authorities to finally charge the 66-year-old retired aerospace worker with the 1972 murder of his mother-in-law, Catherine Marion Halgren, in North Hollywood.

Harlan Gallion, arrested in March, is being held in County Jail in lieu of $1 million bail. The former Pasadena resident has been charged with one count of murder. Although current state law allows capital punishment for murder, the 1972 laws governing Gallion’s case call for a maximum penalty of life in prison with the possibility of parole.

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It has been 18 years since Gallion has seen his daughter but he showed no visible reaction during her testimony. Catherine Gallion, meanwhile, refused to give her married name or place of residence, saying she feared that her father would find a way to harm her family.

During Catherine Gallion’s testimony in Superior Court, Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert L. Cohen repeatedly asked why she had not come forward with her father’s alleged confession before detectives located her early this year.

The answer, she said, lay in the ongoing emotional, physical and sexual abuse that began when she was 9 years old and involved such acts as passing her around to friends during poker games.

Gallion testified that her father also had sexual relations with her older sister, Linda Chant, and often beat her younger sister, Robin Wood. Wood, 42, also testified that she and her sisters were regularly beaten with a belt their father called “Mr. Destry.”

But Gallion said the ultimate horror was the killing of her grandmother, to whom she and her sisters had been very close.

Halgren’s body was found Sept. 16, 1972, in her house in the 4300 block of Cahuenga Boulevard by her daughter, Ramona, who was married to Harlan Gallion at the time.

Cohen said Harlan Gallion killed Halgren, a well-to-do woman who paid much of her daughter’s expenses, for money. When money from her insurance policy ran out around 1974, he divorced Ramona, who died in 1992.

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Catherine Gallion testified that it was in her grandmother’s back yard, just a day or two after the murder, that her father confessed. She was 20 years old.

“He told me that he killed my grandmother,” Catherine Gallion said, her voice soft and clear while her hands and body trembled uncontrollably. “He said that she fought like I had fought him. He said she fought for a long time. He showed me where he killed her. He said he pulled up her top and he choked her.”

Harlan Gallion also boasted to his daughter about cleaning off the walls and other parts of the house where he may have left fingerprints, she testified. “He said he forgot to wipe off one set of his fingerprints. He said he was nervous about that.”

Catherine Gallion said she believed her father told her, but not her sisters, about the killing because, “I was the only one who acted like I wasn’t afraid of him.”

But Gallion told the jury that nonetheless she was as terrified of her father as her sisters were.

“He threatened to kill us all the time,” she said. “He killed my grandmother. I was terrified. I am still afraid of him. I don’t think I’m going to survive.”